Katarzyna de Lazari-Radek - The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and Contemporary Ethics

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To the next generation:

Jan, Izzy, Zofia, Coco, Amalia, and Rafael

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If you think of classical utilitarianism at all, you probably think of Jeremy Bentham or John Stuart Mill. We believe that you should think of Henry Sidgwick. Bentham, of course, was the founder of English utilitarianism, and Mills Utilitarianism is still the most widely read of the nineteenth-century texts. But Sidgwicks The Methods of Ethics far surpasses, in philosophical depth, any of the ethical writings of Bentham or Mill. Regrettably, Sidgwicks masterpiece is still not widely known. This, however, is slowly changing, and we hope to accelerate the pace of that change.

Admittedly, no one would recommend The Methods of Ethics as lively reading. Alfred N. Whitehead is said to have found it so stodgy that it put him off reading another book on ethics.

Even Sidgwicks opponents acknowledge his significance. G. E. M. Anscombe was so adamantly opposed to Sidgwicks views that she suggests that those who think like him show a corrupt mind. Nevertheless, she describes modern English moral philosophy as an epoch marked by a change Sidgwick brought about, so much so that, John Rawls saw utilitarianism as the most serious rival to his own theory of justice, and Sidgwick as its greatest exponent.

We are in full agreement with Broad, Smart, and Parfit. The reason why The Methods is not as widely read as Mills Utilitarianism is quite simpleit is a demanding book to read. German philosophy has a reputation for being difficult, but English utilitarianism always seemed rather easy to understand. Mill has a lively, conversational style. Sidgwick, in contrast, as C. D. Broad wrote,

seldom allowed that strong sense of humour, which is said to have made him a delightful conversationalist, to relieve the uniform dull dignity of his writing. He incessantly refines, qualifies, raises objections, answers them, and then finds further objections to the answers. Each of these objections, rebuttals, rejoinders, and surrejoinders is in itself admirable, and does infinite credit to the acuteness and candour of the author. But the reader is apt to become impatient; to lose the thread of the argument: and to rise from his desk finding that he has read a great deal with constant admiration and now remembers little or nothing. The result is that Sidgwick probably has far less influence at present than he ought to have...

In writing this book, one of our aims has been to enable you to appreciate Sidgwicks thought without having to face the difficulties of reading all 500 pages of The Methods. Thereby we hope to restore The Methods, or at least its key chapters, to its rightful place as the book to which the reader seeking to understand utilitarianism at its best should turn, and to gain for Sidgwick the recognition that is due to one of the greatest of ethical thinkers. To advance this goal, we begin each chapter of this book with a section in which we seek to present Sidgwicks ideas on the topic of that chapter in as clear and straightforward a manner as possible. Because our aim in these sections is to enable you to grasp what Sidgwick wrote, usually in a much more complex way, in his original text, we reserve our assessment of (p.ix) Sidgwicks arguments for the subsequent sections of each chapter. We do not cover all the topics that Sidgwick does, but we have chosen those that seem to us most interesting and important.

Our second and more significant aim is to defend utilitarianism. Sidgwick himself denied that he wroteThe Methods for this purpose, and in one important respect, he failed to do it. We have attempted to develop his ideas in a way that overcomes some of the problems he faced, and shows how, consistently with his approach, objections to utilitarianism made since his time can also be met. Thus in each chapter the remaining sections are focused on the contemporary debate over the issues presented in the exposition of Sidgwicks ideas in the first part of the chapter. You will see that these issues are not in any way peculiar to Sidgwick. They include the most fundamental problems of ethics. But on many of these issues, Sidgwick provided penetrating and plausible answers. In reading The Methods we repeatedly find Sidgwick making points that are still at the centre of current philosophical discussions. On one important aspect of his overall position, however, for reasons we explain in Chapter , we part company with him. This allows us to provide a more complete justification of utilitarianism than he himself was able to achieve.

This book is not a study of the history of ideas. We treat Sidgwick as if he were a contemporary philosopher, to be listened to, but also to be argued with. We start with some biographical details mainly to provide you with some understanding of the kind of person Sidgwick was, rather than to provide clues to the interpretation of his philosophy. This is, we think, how Sidgwick would have preferred to be treated: to be assessed by the cogency of his reasoning, and not as a philosopher living in a particular time and place. This cannot, of course, be an absolute rule. Like every other philosopher, he was a philosopher living in a particular time and place, and sometimes it helps to notice this. As Bart Schultz has pointed out, Sidgwick, like many others of his era, thought that there are inferior and superior races as well as civilized and uncivilized peoples. In his